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Saddam Invited to Attend Arab Summit
Jordanian Interior Minister Awad Khleifat arrived in Baghdad Wednesday by plane to invite Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to attend the coming Arab summit later this month.
Khleifat said at the Saddam International Airport that he, on behalf of King Abdullah Bin Hussein, came to Baghdad to invite Saddam to take part in the two-day Arab summit on March 26-27 in Amman.
Khleifat said he also brought a letter from the Jordanian monarch to the Iraqi president.
It is widely believed that Saddam will not accept the offer because he has never left Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, which ejected Iraqi troops out of Kuwait after seven-month occupation.
Saddam was also invited by his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak to attend the Cairo Arab summit on October 21-22 last year, a signal of Iraq's return to the Arab world, from which it has been excluded since its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Saddam thanked Mubarak for the offer, but apologized for not being able to come to Cairo. Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council, came to the summit representing him.
The upcoming Arab summit is expected to deal with the ongoing situation in the occupied Palestinian territories and ways to support the Palestinian uprising and enhance Arab unity.��
The Iraqi delegation attending the 115th session of the Cairo- based Arab League (AL) Council which concluded Monday in Cairo, demanded that the summit discuss the issues of ending both the decade-old U.N. sanctions and the no-fly zones against Iraq.
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